Lontar: 62 books

Earth Dance, the story of four generations of Balinese women, centers on conflicts that arise between the demands of caste and personal desires.Narrated by Ida Ayu Telaga, a Balinese woman in her thirties, the novel shows Balinese women—as depicted by her mother, grandmother and female peers—to...

In the early 1910s, Semaoen was sentenced to prison for sedition by the Dutch colonial government. The Story of Kadirun, a semi-autobiographical novel, reveals with honesty and comprehensive insight the unjust treatment towards the indigenous people from a historical perspective. Kadirun’s tale,...

A collection of short stories by Lily Yulianti Farid, which has not yet been published as a collection in Indonesian. The stories were written between 2008-2009, showing mosaic spaces in describing Indonesian family life over time. Family room is where the dark side of socio-cultural dynamics and...

The Dancer, a trilogy of novels, recounts the tumultuous days of Indonesia in the mid 1960s. In luscious descriptive language, author Ahmad Tohari describes a village community struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The Dancer highlights the lives of Srintil, a dancer, and Rasus, a bewildered...

A coming-of-age story, a tapestry of erotic and tragic liaisons, a dreamscape of nightmares and wonders. But Ceremony is, above all, a tribute to the ceremony-rich life of the Benuaq Dayak, one of the many “upriver people” of Kalimantan. This post-modern (and first) novel by Korrie Layun Rampan...

In August 1883, massive volcanic eruptions destroyed two-thirds of Krakatau islands, located in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. It was the day the world exploded. Tsunami wreaked havoc in the region, causing countless deaths. Shock waves were recorded around the world. Ashes from the eruptions...

In a Gus tf Sakai story, nothing is as it seems. The unexpected is always happening. Supernatural events occur in ordinary settings, turning lives and reality on end. A three-hundred-year-old Torajan mummy refuses to stay dead. A painting takes on a life of its own and paints the painter. Gus tf Sakai’s...

Afrizal Malna sits apart from many of Indonesia’s recent poets. Not only is he a productive literary and theater critic, he is a novelists and short story writer as well. In a writing career that has now spanned more than thirty years, Afrizal has published several major collections of poetry. His...

A novel by S. Rukiah, The Fall and the Heart (Kedjatuhan dan Hati), was published in 1950?, is one of the strongest works written by women writers before the 1970s, but less well-known because of the political problems (who’s?). The novel tells of a middle-class woman who lived during the 1965 revolution,...

Putu Oka Sukanta, born into a low-caste Balinese family in 1939, began writing poetry and short stories in high school. In the early 1960s, after university studies in Yogyakarta, he moved to Jakarta where he taught high school and began to mix with leftist artists and writers. Sukanta never formally...

The Weaverbirds, a landmark novel when first published, is a tale of both physical and spiritual struggle, spanning the formative days of Indonesian independence and the Indonesian oil crisis in the mid 1970s. Larasati, the precious daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Antana, and Setadewa, the army-brat son...

Jazz, Perfume & the Incident, by Seno Gumira Ajidarma, was first published in Indonesian in 1996 and is the first major Indonesian literary work to deal critically with the horror of life under military occupation in East Timor. This novel, which defied Indonesia’s regime of censorship, made...

Atheis (The Atheist), first published in 1949, portrays the spiritual and intellectual crisis of Hasan, a young Muslim who is raised to be devout but comes to doubt his faith after becoming involved with a group of modern young people. Upon publication, religious thinkers, Marxist-Leninists, as well...

German title: Der Garten der Wonnen und andere Erzählungen Indonesian title: Hikayat Taman Kenikmatan dan cerita lainnya Azhari’s reimagined stories of Aceh in the 17th century encompass a garden of extraordinary beauty, a turtle with chin hairs, pirates in the waters of the Malacca...